Mexican Coffee Buns

Having baked quite a few recipes from this book now and really enjoying it, I decided to buy a copy for a very good friend of mine who is also a very keen baker.  We regularly meet up to take our dogs for a walk and the walk normally results in a pub or café stop somewhere for a bite to eat and a drink.  We both seem to bake more at the weekend and it’s amazing how often we bake the same things, even though we have no idea what the other may be baking that day.  It’s only on our dog walk when we catch up on everything that we find out we’ve been baking very similar if not the same things.  Well, nothing has changed with this book – on a Friday evening I usually receive a text asking me what I’m going to bake from the book.  Without giving each other the exact dish, we both reply with page numbers and then look the recipes up.  This week it was these, the Mexican Coffee Buns and I must admit both our families enjoyed them and have requested for them to be baked again.

I don’t think anyone knows where the name for these buns comes from.  They resemble a Mexican bun called a concha and, yes, you can eat them while you drink coffee.  Sound convincing?  I thought not.  They are sold all over Malaysia and a baker chain called Rotiboy has made them so famous that they are often called Rotiboy buns.

Ingredients

Scalded Dough

• 100g plain flour
• 70g boiling water

Dough

• 400g plain flour
• 1¼ tsp instant yeast, 1¾ tsp dried yeast or 10g fresh yeast
• 80g sugar
• 175g milk (heated up to just below boiling point and allowed to cool to room temperature)
• 10g salt
• 1 egg
• 60g butter (cubed)

Filling

• 100g butter, divided into 12 small cubes

Topping

• 125g butter (at room temperature)
• 125g icing sugar
• 1 egg
• 240g plain flour
• ½ tsp Pandan paste or 3 tbsp. strong coffee (optional)

The first thing to do in this recipe is to make the scalded dough.  Weigh the flour in a small bowl and pour over the boiling water.  Stir to mix together.  Cover and set aside.

Weigh the flour in a big bowl, make a well, sprinkle the yeast and sugar into the well and pour over the cooled milk.  Flick some flour over the top of the milk.  Cover and leave to rest for an hour.

Add the salt and egg and mix together.  Add the scalded dough – which by now will be quite solid – so break it up into small pieces and add it to the dough.  Once all the ingredients have been incorporated, turn the dough out onto a board and knead for 10 minutes.  Once the dough was smooth I added the cubes of butter and kneaded it again for 10 minutes.  It’s always messy to start with once you add the butter, but it soon comes together again and you are left with a lovely smooth dough.   Return the dough to the bowl, cover and leave for 2 hours. I actually left mine for longer than this as I had to make the evening meal, so it wasn’t until around 7pm that I started on the next stage!  I do find that the buns from this book do take a long time, so it’s best to start things off first thing in the morning, rather than mid-afternoon as I had today!  But they’re all well worth the time and effort!

Pull the dough out onto a board and divide into 12 equal portions.  Roll the dough into tight balls by placing your hand over the ball of dough with your fingertips on the table and the palm of your hand lightly on the top of the dough.  Roll you hand in a circular motion until the dough forms a ball.  Leave the dough on the board and cover with a clean tea towel and allow to rest for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes gently flatten the dough balls with your hand into discs.  Pop a little cube of butter into the middle of the disc and stretch the dough out and around the butter.  Roll it up and shape it again into a tight ball.  Be very gently otherwise you’ll find the butter will escape through the tiniest split!  Place the buns onto a baking tray lined with parchment, cover with a clean tea towel and leave to rest for 30 minutes.  By now I knew I wouldn’t be tasting these buns this evening as they would be going into the oven around 9.30 pm!

Whilst the buns are resting, mix together the ingredients for the topping.  I used Camp coffee in my mix, as I don’t know locally where I would be able to purchase Pandan paste (but I will be looking out for it now, so I can make these again).  Now, my friend had baked these the day before and having been on a long dog walk with her this morning, she told me that the mix was rather stiff and that she had trouble piping it on top of the buns.  She also said she cut the hole too small in her bag and ended up piping over them twice but still had nearly three-quarters of the mixture left over  So, the icing bag was filled and a small hole snipped off the end.  I piped the mixture over the top in a spiral (see photo).   However, I too had quite a lot of the mixture left over and there was no way I could pipe anymore onto the tops of the buns.  The book tells you to pipe a thin swirl on the top of each bun.  My swirl was more of a snail shell, in that there wasn’t a gap between the swirl, so I really didn’t think I could pipe any more onto the buns.  Looking at the recipe for the topping, I suppose it would be difficult to reduce the mixture in any way as you only use one egg, but if you do decide to bake these, I would make half the amount for the topping.  At least that way you won’t be wasting very much.   The buns were left again for 15 minutes.

Preheat the oven and pop the buns in to bake for around 15 minutes.  Once baked cool on a cooling rack until completely cool.

I did as I suspected, pipe the topping too thick, as looking at the photo in the book, you should still be able to see the sprial shape of the piping on top.  Mine had all merged together!

As I said, we had to wait until the next day to taste these and we weren’t disappointed.  We had them for breakfast, they were delicious.  My daughter, who was running late for work that morning, took one with her to eat on her way to work.  She was worried as they were ‘coffee buns’ and she’s not a great fan of coffee cake, but even she thought they were tasty.  They didn’t really taste of coffee, but instead they were a lovely light, soft sweet buttery flavoured bun.  As I’ve said in previous recipes, this one is now our favourite, but how long for, until I bake the next recipe …

If you like these, click on the link for Rotiboy above as they do a Mochaboy – a coffee topping with chocolate filling – I’m definitely going to try that one!